Upcoming "Threepenny Opera" is GreenHouse Theatre Project's first musical
Columbia's shape-shifting, site-specific GreenHouse Theatre Project knows how to make the most of any and every space. For its latest show — each its own sort of milestone — GreenHouse will finally fill a room with song.
"The Threepenny Opera," which celebrates its 95th anniversary this year, is the troupe's first musical. And the show, set to debut later this month, gathers a serious array of local talent.
University of Missouri mainstay David Crespy directs the show, while gifted local musician Robin Anderson will guide the cast through the songs of Kurt Weill. Weill's music sets the play by Bertolt Brecht.
And an ensemble of more than 10 actors features GreenHouse co-founder and artistic shepherd Elizabeth Braaten Palmieri, among other Columbia luminaries.
"The Threepenny Opera," which premiered in Berlin in late-summer 1928, "follows underworld antihero Mackie Messer aka Mack the Knife as he woos women and eludes the authorities," GreenHouse notes in a press release.
Weill's "sly melodies" and Brecht's "daring" form "a socialist critique of the capitalist world," the release notes. The show features a wide variety of tunes, the most enduring among them "The Ballad of Mack the Knife," which became a charting single for everyone from Bobby Darin to Louis Armstrong and Ella Fitzgerald.
The show carved a new path between opera and musical theater, leading the 20th-century writer Hans Keller to call it "the weightiest possible lowbrow opera for highbrows and the most full-blooded highbrow musical for lowbrows."
The show will run at 7:30 p.m. Oct. 25-27 and 2 and 7:30 p.m. Oct. 28 at Bur Oak Brewing Company. Tickets are $12-$20. Visit https://www.greenhousetp.org/ for more information.
Aarik Danielsen is the features and culture editor for the Tribune. Contact him at adanielsen@columbiatribune.com or by calling 573-815-1731. He's on Twitter @aarikdanielsen.
This article originally appeared on Columbia Daily Tribune: GreenHouse Theatre Project strikes into musicals with "Threepenny Opera"
